The Music of Pythagoras (9 page)

The shining circlets of his golden hair

Which even the Graces might be proud to wear
,

Instarred with gems and gold, bestrew the shore

With dust dishonored, and deformed with gore.

. . . .

Thus young, thus beautiful Euphorbus lay
,

While the fierce Spartan tore his arms away
.
³

Diogenes Laertius gave the full version of a tale that many thought constituted proof of Pythagoras’ memories, but that Iamblichus rejected as being “too popular in nature” and Porphyry thought “too generally known” to require telling:
^*
After Euphorbus died by the hand of King Menelaus in the Trojan War, his soul (either directly or after several other lifetimes) passed into Hermotimus. Hermotimus, in turn, was able to prove this had indeed happened. In some versions of the story it occurred at Branchidae in western Turkey; in others, at Argos on the Greek mainland; but, wherever it happened, Hermotimus entered a temple where a decaying shield was nailed up on the wall, little of it intact except an ivory boss. This relic had either been left by Menelaus as a tribute to Apollo or was simply among spoils of the Trojan War. At the sight of the rotten old shield, Hermotimus burst into tears. People standing near questioned him, and he muttered that he himself, as Euphorbus, had carried it at Troy. The bystanders thought he was insane, but he told them that they would find the name Euphorbus inscribed on the back. They unfastened the shield from the wall and discovered, in archaic lettering, that very name.
⁴
Hermotimus eventually died and became Pyrrhus, a fisherman of Delos, and, some time after Pyrrhus, Pythagoras. Nor was that the full extent of Pythagoras’ memories. His soul had passed into many plants and animals, and he could recall his suffering in Hades, as well as the sufferings endured by the others there.

In the doctrine of transmigration as Pythagoras taught it, a soul was not irrevocably doomed to an eternal round of animal and vegetable existences. Escape was possible, as it was in Orphism. The possibility and method of this escape came to stand at the heart of the Pythagorean view of the world. There was a divine level of immortality from which each soul was a “torn off fragment,” a mere “spark of the divine fire,” held captive in a long train of dying bodies.
⁵
The goal of a wise human was to break free of bondage to this treadmill of earthly reincarnation and rejoin the sublime level.

By tradition, Pythagoras coined the term “philosopher,” meaning “lover of wisdom,” but it is probably more correct to say that he gave it
a new meaning. A philosopher did not merely love wisdom, he pursued it with all his might, because that was the way to regain the true, divine life of the soul. The historian Aristoxenus wrote of the Pythagoreans he knew: “Every distinction they lay down as to what should be done or not done aims at conformity with the divine. This is their starting-point; their whole life is ordered with a view to following God, and it is the governing principle of their philosophy.”
⁶
All philosophy and inquiry—all use of the powers of reason and observation to gain an understanding of nature, human nature, the world, and the cosmos, including what would later be called “science”—was linked with, indeed
was
, the effort to purify the soul and escape the wheel of reincarnation. This connection, for the Pythagoreans, was the most exalted living-out of the doctrine of the “unity of all being.”

Such a relentless pursuit had been recommended in much more ancient wisdom literature, including Proverbs in the Hebrew Scriptures (“Old Testament”). However, nowhere else did the search for the wisdom of God or the gods include so comprehensively the search for knowledge about the physical universe. As the scholar W. K. C. Guthrie put it:

It is to this idea of assimilation to the divine as the legitimate and essential aim of human life that Pythagoras gave his allegiance, and he supported it with all the force of a philosophical and mathematical, as well as a religious, genius. In this lies the originality of Pythagoreanism.
⁷

In a less reverent vein, Diogenes Laertius quoted the poet Xenophanes of Colophon, who lived most of his adult life in Sicily and Italy and was probably a contemporary of Pythagoras, though he survived him by many years. Xenophanes wrote satirical poems, and in these lines he made light of Pythagoras’ belief in reincarnation:

And once when he passed a puppy that was being whipped

they say he took pity on it and made this remark:

“Stop, do not beat him; for it is the soul of a dear friend—

I recognized it when I heard its voice
.”
^*

This verse is usually taken to mean that Pythagoras claimed to recognize the voice of a friend who had died and been reincarnated as the puppy, but for a Pythagorean it would have had a more profound meaning. A “dear friend” was any member of a vast kinship, embracing all of nature including animals and vegetables and the souls of humans. In no other Greek society was that kinship so celebrated as among the Pythagoreans, or so firmly believed to be not a melting pot but a beautifully ordered unity: in the words of W. K. C. Guthrie, “a
kosmos
—that untranslatable word which unites, as perhaps only the Greek spirit could, the notion of order, arrangement or structural perfection with that of beauty.”
⁸
Some Pythagoreans extended the unity to time. Aristotle’s pupil Eudemus wrote that “if we are to believe the Pythagoreans and hold that things the same in number recur—that you will be sitting here and I shall talk to you, holding this stick, and so on for everything else—then it is plausible that the same time too recurs.”
⁹

T
HE BELIEF THAT
souls, at death, pass into other persons, animals, or plants might be expected to have had implications for what Pythagoreans did and did not eat, just as it did for the Orphic cult. However, the particulars of the Pythagorean diet have never been clear to anyone except Pythagoras and his immediate followers and have, since early times, been subject to much speculation, many opinions, and irreverent humor. Any abstention must have been for reasons other than the avoidance of eating another soul, for a human was just as likely to be reincarnated as a vegetable, and you had to eat
something
. Empedocles is supposed to have remarked that if you could choose your next life, a lion or a laurel bush would be good choices. Iamblichus thought Pythagoras ordained abstinence from animal flesh as “conducive to peaceableness.” A man trained to abominate the slaughter of animals “will think it much more unlawful to kill a man or engage in war.”

Aristotle felt sure that Pythagoras and his followers did eat the meat of animals except the womb and heart and sea urchins. Possibly they also avoided mullet, added Plutarch. Diogenes Laertius insisted that
red
mullet, blacktail, and the hearts of animals were forbidden but reported that Aristoxenus said Pythagoreans ate all other animals besides lambs, oxen used in agriculture, and rams. Porphyry, basing his conclusion on an early source from the fourth or early third century
B.C
., believed Pythagoras held a double standard: Someone not engaged in the
lifelong Pythagorean pursuit of wisdom—an athlete or soldier, for instance (recall Pythagoras’ advice to the young Olympians)—could eat meat. But for a member of his own school Pythagoras allowed only a ritual taste of meat being offered as a sacrifice to the gods. According to Porphyry, this abstinence was motivated by reverence for the unity and kinship of all life, and Pythagoras’ preferred diet included honey; bread of millet; barley; and herbs, raw and boiled. Porphyry even provided recipes he said were favorites of Pythagoras:

He made a mixture of poppy seed and sesame, the skin of a sea-onion, well washed until entirely drained of the outward juices, of the flowers of the daffodil, and the leaves of mallows, of paste of barley and chick peas, taking an equal weight of which, and chopping it small, with honey of Hymettus he made it into a mass. Against thirst he took the seed of cucumbers, and the best dried raisins, extracting the seeds, and coriander flowers, and the seeds of mallows, purslane, scraped cheese, wheat meal and cream, all of which he mixed up with wild honey.

Porphyry wrote that Pythagoras did not claim to have invented these recipes; they had been taught by Demeter to Hercules when he was sent into the Libyan desert.

Information about the diet of later Pythagoreans, though not necessarily the diet advised by Pythagoras himself more than a century before, comes from fourth century
B.C
. comic plays by Antiphanes, Alexis, and Aristophon.
¹⁰
Their portrayals may have been accurate or perhaps were only commonly accepted stereotypes, but these were all highly respected playwrights. Antiphanes, who was renowned for his parody and astute criticism of literature and philosophy, wrote that “some miserable Pythagorists were in the gully munching purslane and collecting the wretched stuff in sacks.” In his play
The Sack
, he had a character who “like a Pythagorizer, eats no meat but takes and chews a blackened piece of cheap bread.” In Alexis’
The Men from Tarentum
“‘Pythagorisms’ and fine arguments and close-chopped thoughts nourish them” while they eat daily only “one plain loaf each and a cup of water—a prison diet! Do all wise men live like that?” Apparently not, for another character replied that some Pythagoreans “dine every four days on a single cup of bran.” Aristophon, in
The Pythagorist
, wrote:

For drinking water [not wine], they are frogs; for enjoying thyme and vegetables, they are caterpillars; for not being washed, they are chamber-pots; for staying out of doors all winter, blackbirds; for standing in the heat and chattering at noon, cicadas; for never oiling themselves, dust-clouds; for walking about at dawn without any shoes, cranes; for not sleeping at all, bats.

Alexis, in
The Men from Tarentum
, offered a witticism that became so current it was probably eventually greeted with groans: “The Pythagorizers, as we hear, eat no fish nor anything else alive; and they’re the only ones who don’t drink wine.”—“But Epicharides eats dogs, and he’s a Pythagorean.”—“Ah, but he kills them first and then they’re no longer alive.” Diogenes Laertius took up the same theme centuries later in a “jesting epigram” in his biography of Pythagoras:

You are not the only man who has abstained

From living food; for so have we;

And who, I’d like to know, did ever taste

Food while alive, most sage Pythagoras?

When meat is boiled, or roasted well and salted
,

I do not think it well can be called living
.

Which, without scruple therefore then we eat
,

And call it no more living flesh, but meat
.

T
HE BEST-KNOWN CONTROVERSY
about Pythagoras’ diet had to do with his attitude toward beans—not such a trivial question as it might seem, for this attitude may later have contributed to his death.

The poet Callimachus lived in the third century
B.C
. and, in addition to much splendid poetry, produced a critical and biographical catalog of the authors whose works were in the collection of the Alexandria Library. He was familiar with much literature that was no longer available to later scholars because it perished when the library burned. Callimachus agreed with an idea that he attributed to Pythagoras himself: that beans are “a painful food.” Cicero wrote, citing Plato, that the Pythagoreans were forbidden to eat them because they cause flatulence and hence are not conducive to peace of mind and a good night’s sleep. Other reports had it that flatulence was an indication beans contained
air. Since it was widely held that the soul itself was air, this might have been interpreted to mean that when one ate a bean one was eating a soul. Diogenes Laertius said that avoiding beans made for gentle dreams, “free from agitation.” He also reported several reasons given by Aristotle why the Pythagoreans did not eat beans, including that they were “used in elections in oligarchical governments.” Plato’s pupil Heracleides Ponticus connected the avoidance of beans with the discovery that a bean placed in a new tomb, buried in dung, and left for forty days took on the appearance of a human. One tale about Pythagoras’ power to communicate with animals told of an ox that Pythagoras saw eating beans. When the herdsman mockingly refused to follow Pythagoras’ advice to order the ox to abstain, Pythagoras whispered in its ear and the ox never again touched a bean. Pythagoras took it to live many years as the “sacred ox” at Hera’s temple.

Aulus Gellius, whose second century
A.D
. writings preserve many fragments of otherwise lost works, vehemently disagreed with the idea that Pythagoras forbade the eating of beans. Aristoxenus, he pointed out, had insisted that Pythagoras ate plenty of them, in fact more than any other vegetable, because “they soothe and gently relieve the bowels.” Aulus Gellius also believed he could explain the unfortunate misunderstanding: It stemmed from an overly naive interpretation of a poem by Empedocles that included the phrase: “Wretches, utter wretches, keep your hands from beans!” Gellius’ scholarly approach revealed that the word “beans” here did not mean the vegetable; it meant “testicles.” Pythagoreans used obscurely symbolic aphorisms that could only be deciphered by other Pythagoreans, and when Empedocles spoke of “beans,” Gellius insisted, he intended them to symbolize the cause of human pregnancy and the impetus to human reproduction. The bean is, after all, a seed, with similar potential. Gellius, then, interpreted Empedocles’ phrase to mean, “Avoid sexual indulgence!”
¹¹

Pythagoras apparently did not encourage celibacy, for several accounts had him urging his followers to beget children so as to leave servants of god to take their place in the next generation. But sex, it seems, stopped there. According to Diogenes Laertius, Pythagoras, “did not indulge in the pleasures of love” and advised others to have sex only “whenever you are willing to be weaker than yourself.” In contrast to all the humor at the Pythagoreans’ expense, Pythagoras himself came across, at least in Diogenes Laertius’ biography, as humorless, though
not necessarily joyless. He “abstained wholly from laughter, and from all such indulgences as jests and idle stories,” advising others as well that “modesty and decorum consist in never yielding to laughter, without looking stern”—which, if true, indicates that Pythagoras would not have approved of Diogenes Laertius’ “jesting epigrams.” Porphyry’s description showed Pythagoras not so much humorless as extremely even-tempered, not “elated by pleasure, nor dejected by grief, and no one ever saw him either rejoicing or mourning.” Porphyry attributed this “constancy” to Pythagoras’ careful diet.